1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a processing method enabling each unit in a stacking network device to run Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol, more particularly to a processing method applied to a stacking network system to effectively reduce the working burden of the master unit through uniformly distributing the work of executing the Spanning Tree Protocol (hereinafter abbreviated as STP) and the relating algorithm to the slave units according to the Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (hereinafter abbreviated as RSTP).
2. Description of the Related Art
In the recent years, due to the prosperous development in the network world, a variety of the network devices have been developed and been widely used in our living and working environments. The trend of network development not only increases the speed and efficiency of information transaction, but also brings lots of conveniences to our daily lives and works. Within the variety of network systems, the Stacking or Chassis Layer 2/Layer 3 Switch seems to be the most favorite to the market, and becomes a main stream in the future development of the network devices and is widely seen in the market nowadays. Many of these switches implement Spanning Tree Protocol to build an active topology and to provide an alternative path that may have been introduced to improve reliability in LAN.
There are many methods to implement Spanning Tree Protocol in stacking network devices. One of the method, maybe the simplest way, is to run Spanning Tree Protocol and the relating algorithm in one unit, usually the smallest unit number (i.e. unit 1), this unit is called “master unit”. Other units are called “slave unit”. This naming of the unit is proprietary and of course could be different in various kinds of switches. All operations of the Spanning Tree Protocol, such like recording the received BPDU information, calculation of Spanning Tree priority vectors and Spanning Tree timer values etc, are only done by master unit. The workload of master unit is linearly increased with the number of device ports. This not only greatly lower down the network transmission efficiency of the stacking network system, but also cause bad influences to the quality and speed of the network information transmission.